Rauschenberg Foundation

We linked to this yesterday in our Interview with Clynton Lowry at Art Handler Magazine, but the Installator tumblr is truly astonishing. The beauty and spectacle of an install pictured perfectly; the copper statue, La Defense, dangling from a crane, the shiny La Grande Madre by Jeff Koons, wrapped and unwrapped, workers deconstructing Art Basel Miami Beach. [Installator]

The Buy Art Fair has just launched in Manchester. Frank Cohen, the “Manchester Medici”, offers advice on buying art. He has some pretty obvious recommendations like “buy what you like” but also encourages new collectors to go for more inexpensive options such as prints. [BBC]

The artist-run space Field Projects has put out an open call for their November 2015 exhibition, curated by Lauren Haynes of the Studio Museum in Harlem. It’s a good opportunity to show in Chelsea or at least make curators aware of your work. [Field Projects]

Endless lawsuits related to art authentication have caused many to avoid offering the service to collectors and dealers altogether. The Andy Warhol Foundation dissolved its authentication board; “One year our legal bill ran up $7 million,” according to director Joel Wachs, “we got tired of giving money to lawyers. We’d rather be giving it to artists.” [Forbes]

For $50, Harvard students living in campus housing can rent prints from the Harvard Art Museums’ collection—including originals from Picasso and Warhol. [NBC News]

In related Boston news, there’s been a lot of social media speculation about the “mystery man” who appeared on the facade of the former Hancock Building. It turns out the vinyl mural is the work of French street artist JR. [The Boston Globe]

This is great. The Robert Rauschenberg Foundation is offering grants for artists to address racial injustice in the US prison system. Applications for the Artist as Activist Fellowship are due December 7th. [The Art Newspaper]

Brooklyn artist Tina Trachtenburg has immortalized the internet-famous “Pizza Rat” in soft sculpture. For $80, you can own one of the artist’s plush rats, but the pizza isn’t included. That’s an additional $20. [Artnet News]

Useless Press is a new publishing collective edited by Sam Lavigne, Adrian Chen and Alix Rule that creates eclectic internet things. So far, they’ve found a data set of decapitated animals and issued a call for proposals to work with this material and published “Call to Wait” a phone line that puts callers on hold for seven years. “Call to Wait” is described as a “long term project”. Anyway, this is brilliant. Here’s a story on another project, Data Drive, which is a paper Facebook. [Flavorwire]

Have an X-Men fantasy to live out? Find your inner Dazzler at a London exhibition by conceptual artist Marcus Lyall, composer Rob Thomas, and designer Alex Anpilogov; where a viewer’s brain waves control lasers. [The Creator’s Project]

Artist-activists should apply right now to the Rauschenberg Foundation’s “Artist as Activist” program. They’re giving away piles and piles of money to artists committed to working with the public. Applications are due October 13th. Following grants will be awarded to help combat climate change. [The Rauschenberg Foundation]

One Amazon-published pulp novelist writes that Amazon has enabled him to produce more than he ever would have through traditional publishers, and the same is true for crime novelists, fan fiction writers, and niche writers the world over. “It’s been the most enjoyable creative burst of my career, a gleeful hack’s sprint toward nowhere in particular,” Neal Pollack writes. [Slate]

More points for Amazon: back in May, the company joined a coalition of big companies in favor of net neutrality. Sign this net neutrality petition for this blog, and all blogs. [Battle for the Net]

Just announced: Hyperplace Harlem is a three day festival featuring media and visual artists, readings, performances, workshops, and discussions that runs from October 4-6. There should be lots of tech projects here; get your nerd on. [Hyperplace]

What do you even do with 71 paintings after they’re all reported stolen? [Artnet News]

Watch-nerds review the Apple Watch. The verdict? It will disrupt the low-end watch market. “It offers so much more functionality than other digitals it’s almost embarrassing.” Read the section on the straps. Rarely have I seen such fawning. And in the “not so great” section of the review a favorite heading: Market Leader in a Category No One Really Asked For. The question posed by the author in this part of the review is whether the Apple Watch is Google’s Glass? I can answer that one right away: No. Google Glass is for assholes. [Hodinkee]

Carolina Miranda talks to artist Lisa Anne Auerbach about her zines, paintings, knitting, and why cats show up in her work so much. [Culture: High & Low]

Like New York, Miami housing has also become a piggybank for the foreign rich. Is displacement potentially endless? Will every city turn into a giant empty condo? [vocativ]

Maybe not! Brooklyn’s median rent has decreased for the first time in 15 months. We’ll hold our excitement, though, since we heard similars about Manhattan last year, and little has come of those. [Curbed]

The Camera Club of New York has been around since 1884. They’re moving to 126 Baxter Street in Chinatown. [Bowery Boogie]

“Sharks are like swimming noses,” says Danielle Dixon, an assistant professor in the School of Biology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. Shark noses suffer when carbon levels rise. Sharks will die. [Treehugger]

Johnson also tells Yahoo! News about the Mona Lisa of digital art. And the answer is…it does not exist. But in Johnson’s opinion, the most widely-recognized digital artwork is Jon Rafman’s “9 Eyes of Google Street View,” which premiered right here on Art F City. [Yahoo! Tech]

Crazy town. A judge has ruled that Rauschenberg trustees can receive $24.6 million in fees from the foundation. This number is considerably less than the $60 million Bennet Grutman, Rauschenberg’s accountant; Darryl Pottorf, executor of the artist’s will; and Bill Goldston, a business partner of the artist in a fine art print publishing company were looking for, but more than the $375,000 the foundation wanted to pay. $24.6 million fees are reasonable, citing their exemplary job growing the value of the estate. [The Art Newspaper]

Somebody named Richard Lawler called art advisor Todd Levin this weekend about two “newly discovered” Leonardo da Vinci paintings. Are they real? Levin seems to doubt their authenticity. Artnet called Lawler, but the call was off the record. [artnet News]

Werner Herzog gets interviewed by New York Magazine. They talk about his life’s work, his vision, his views on culture and filmmakers, Nazis and tourists, and we’re here to boil it down into a few soundbites. Actually, no. You just gotta read it. [Vulture]

It’s Barack Obama’s birthday. [Twitter]

All the ice cream cake stores in New York that will write “Free Palestine” on your cake. Dairy Queen will not. [ANIMAL New York]

The Marina Abramovic Institute, currently fundraising for a $20 million Rem Koolhaas-designed headquarters, is seeking unpaid volunteers . MAI responds to claims about unpaid labor with a statement that spools in the type of language we always hear that it’s about connections and exposure. Money? You can live without that for several months, right? And commute between Hudson and New York City for the MAI on no money, too. [Los Angeles Times]

A new study reveals that women are more likely to be lied to in negotiations than men. “One of the study’s experiments showed that part of the reason women are lied to more often is that they’re perceived as being less competent but warmer than men in negotiations.” [Time]

A weird, $999,000 Rembrandt painting appeared on eBay last week. Now, there’s furniture from the Élysée Palace, home to the French president, turning up on there too. This also comes after the news that 32 artworks and 625 pieces of furniture were missing from the residence. Sketchy. [Artnet News via Le Figaro]

The New York Times has assigned their war time reporter Graham Bowley to the arts beat. He’s rewriting an old story from four months ago about how everyone has to participate in art fairs, and middle-tier galleries are getting squeezed out of the market. Dealer Gordon VeneKlasen from Michael Werner Gallery is a primary source for the article because what? This is a dealer who’s been around for 21 years, and very few people in the contemporary scene seem to know who he is (us included). If they’re assigning reporters without the background to match their beats, I hate to think of what Times journalists are missing elsewhere. [The New York Times via: Magda Sawon]

Lynne Tillsman introduces a beautiful short story by Jane Bowles, “Everything is Nice”. [Recommended Reading]

Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento’s Art and Law program is accepting applications through October 4th. If this is a subject you’re interested in, then this is the course to take. [Sergio Muñoz Sarmiento]

Bill Goldston, Bennet Grutman, and Darryl Pottorf are trustees of the Rauschenberg Foundation and claim that they are owed 60 million in fees. An expert hired by the Rauschenberg foundation estimates that they are asking for $40,000-an-hour wage. The trustees concede that they did not keep track of all the work they did while Rauschenberg was alive. [The New York Times]

This is fun: Jonathan Jones’s “think piece” on sexism ultimately amounts to a public apology on behalf of all critics. “The bad guys are us, the critics. For art criticism is still a very male profession with very male values.” [The Guardian]

Missing your daily art fraud fix? Turns out that $80 million of “never-before-seen” Rothkos, De Koonings, and Pollocks were fake. [Forbes]

Israel’s top ten influential art people includes no artists and a public relations executive. [Haaretz]

Photographer Jill Peters made a portrait series of “Sworn Virgins”, Albanian women who live as men. According to Peters, back in the old days in the Balkans, if you wanted to “vote, drive, conduct business, earn money, drink, smoke, swear, own a gun or wear pants”, you had to be a man. [Petapixel]

People are selling things like lizards and removed babydoll faces on Instagram– it’s like Etsy with a dash of Craigslist. [Wired]

Looks like the art world conversation about climate change won’t end with Expo. The Rauschenberg Foundation is teaming up with Ballroom Marfa and the Public Concern Foundation for “Marfa Dialogues,” a series of exhibitions and events this fall. [The New York Times]

Very happy about this news: Health plan costs for New Yorkers is set to drop by 50 percent (and much more if you qualify for federal subsidy) [The New York Times]

More concerns raised about the plan to gut the historic Fifth Avenue library, met with the usual brush-off. We’ll hear more about it from the lawsuit. [The New York Times]

Famed figurative Maritime painter Alex Colville has died at the age of 92. Colville had a tremendous influence on many schools in the region, including Mount Allison University, where AFC’s Paddy Johnson went to school. [National Post]

The Smithsonian does not sound like a fun enterprise to work for. After unrelated worker protests at two museums last week, the Hirschhorn’s hemorrhaging board members. Constance Caplan becomes the seventh to leave over the past year, blaming a contentious work environment. [Washington Post]